vSphere Homelab Version 2017

Well there are a lot of people having a lot of home lab installations out there. The latest trending home lab servers are Intel NUCs. I started to think about replacing my old PCs I still use as physical ESXi servers. Looking at Intel NUCs is for sure an option. The price is really interesting, but the max mem is 32 GB and they come with one NIC only, and you cannot really put a lot of disk space into these beasts. – So my plan was to have a home lab with some VSAN capacity, and the option to extend them in the next 12 months. – So I started to look for an alternative to these NUC babies.

What I found was Shuttle XPC cube barebone. The latest model the SZ170R8V2 comes with 2 built-in Intel 1 GB NICs, four DDR4 DIMM slots offering 64 GB max memory, 4 x 3,5″ disk chassis and M.2 SSD card slot, and on top of all this 2 PCI slots all of this in a nice 33 x 21 x 19 cm cube and it accepts Intel Gen 7 CPU (with the latest BIOS). – The best of the Shuttle motherboard is it uses Intel standard chips for NIC and graphics, so just run ESXi 6.5 without any tweaking of drivers etc.

For sure it is not supported to run VSAN, but it works – and that’s the main point for a home lab! (the Shuttle has HDMI and display port video connectors, so maybe you need an adapter to connect you DVI or VGA monitor…)

My configuration to start would be an I7 Gen processor (quad core) 32 GB memory, M.2 250 GB SSD as cache and a 512 GB SSD for capacity. This confiurationg can be extended with maybe a dual 10 GB NIC, another 32 GB of memory and some SSD (there is space for 3 more SATA devices…) for capacity in the next months when prices hopefully drop…

So what was the price for this? – Living in Switzerland I just take the swiss price and convert it in US$ to give you an idea

1 x Shuttle Barebone SZ170R8V2

306 US$

1 x Corsair Vengeance LPX (2x, 16GB, DDR4-2400, DIMM 288)

281 US$

1 x INTEL Core i7-7700 Kaby Lake Prozessor

299 US$

1 x SAMSUNG SSD 2.5″ 512GB SATA 6Gb/s 850 Pro

235 US$

1 x SSD 960 Evo M.2 250 GB

126 US$

1 x USB Stick 32 GB Kingston DTSE9 G2 (boot device)

24 US$

TOTAL

1271 US$

The other good thing I saw so far, the Shuttle does not produce much heat, and it is pretty quiet!